The Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics edited by Ion Trewin

A certain admirable cheek, this.

When I routinely reassure anxious politicians that under no circumstances will their thoughts on the idiocy of a colleague's recent pratfall or the shortcomings of their leader be attributed to them in my columns, none has so far thought to add: "I do hope that goes for when you're dead as well." On closer inspection, though, this isn't full disclosure. All living participants were able to excise rude bits, or, in the case of the great luncharian Roy Hattersley, decline to appear at all.

Young plied the political columnist's trade for three decades, which gives this volume the benefit of a wide sweep. We begin with Douglas Hurd in 1969, dissecting Ted Heath's strategy for defeating Harold Wilson, and end with Cherie Blair berating Young for saying that her husband should stand down in 2003.

He's good on the mixture of constancies and unanticipated shifts which make politics so fascinating to those who can bear to watch.

Young doesn't quite get Thatcher's appeal (far from alone in that) until she is installed, and then succumbs to the lure of access: "Far less shrill than ever in living memory: cool, quiet, rather more galleon-like in appearance, very confident and ready with facts and figures." What a difference power makes.

The author's sources are worked assiduously: his note-taking would put most of us to shame in its detail and the resulting jottings are, like his erstwhile columns, precise, informative, intellectually accurate.

A touch bloodless though, unless you share his near-maniacal devotion to the project of European integration.

"The only non-English painting," he notes with disgust of Mrs T's No 10, "was a small landscape". The horror.

Vanity is the columnist's déformation professionelle and it is here in some spades — when Princess Diana lunches at the Guardian, Young records the event as everyone else being a toady while he said just the right thing to fascinate her.

Up pops Gordon Brown every few years — a reminder of how long this tough old buzzard has been around.

In a book not bursting with amusing description, one encounter stands out, with Young despairing of the Gordon habit of repeating the same arguments and phrases over and over "like a television camera, endlessly turning". Peter Mandelson fillets GB and Europe, "Gordon opposing entry to the single currency for purely personal reasons — it's all about personal ambition. Ed Balls is a poisonous influence." See how they love one another.

Character traits do come through the rather aloof accounts: Brown's determination, Blair's protean shifts and the sense of vagary around the star who never quite rises, David Miliband: he "never intended to become MP for South Shields & he thought about running a big charity. Or something. Wasn't sure what or where." It's a classy political read, no doubt.

Yet in the era of instant memoirs and blabbing wives, it just feels too restrained, or trop gentile, as we would expect from the Great European of newspapers..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Hugo Young was one of Britain's leading journalists for over thirty years, first on the "Sunday Times", where he was political editor and deputy editor, and then as the "Guardian"'s senior political commentator. On his death in 2003 he was called 'the Pope of the liberal left', but for the last decade or more of his life there was really no more admired and respected journalist in any position on the political spectrum. One of the secrets of Young's success as a journalist was that he was exceptionally well informed. Politicians from every major party, senior civil servants, judges and public figures of all kinds talked to him off the record, discussions which then informed the judgements he made when he wrote. Most of his interlocutors were unaware that straight after their telephone conversation, meal or meeting with Young had finished, he meticulously wrote down exactly what had been said, together with his own immediate impressions of whoever he was talking to.By 2003, Young's records from such conversations amounted to a million and a half words. From this extraordinary archive Ion Trewin, who knew Young since they were colleagues in the 1960s, has made a selection which presents a unique record of what many of the leading figures in British political and public life were thinking, frankly and without the distortions of hindsight, for more than three decades. The result is one of the most gripping and informative books about British politics published for many years.Young's first interviewee, Douglas Hurd, later Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, and one of his regulars for the whole of the period of this book, judged him thus: 'His success was partly achieved by creating a conversation between two people roughly equal in status and knowledge. His own preconception sometimes appeared, as is natural in a conversation between equals, but never in a way which interrupted the even flow of discourse. He did not distort what he heard'. "The Hugo Young Papers" shows Young's central place in the nexus between politics and journalism in Britain and provides a historical document of the first rank.